Steve B
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Using Office 365 on a cloned Windows 10 Pro base image in VMWare Horizon best practice?
I have a VMWare Horizon environment where we have anywhere from 60-80 virtual desktops (via thin clients) online at any given time. We are a small hospital so that is why we have so many more users than machines in use being a 24/7 facility. I have 140 users in the environment and all of the virtual desktops are cloned from one Windows 10 Professional image that has all of the software we use installed on it. If I have a power user that needs more than what our base image has (Adobe Creative Cloud for example), they get a PC desktop. Very few of those.
I am looking to move on from Microsoft Office 2010, which is installed completely on the base image that is cloned for everyone by Horizon. I want to purchase Office 365, specifically the Office Pro Plus 2019 package that has just the basic applications with no email plan or other non-essentials. We will also not be extending Office to home users. I plan to control access to launching Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc through Active Directory so I can tightly control my licensing. I am guessing that about half of my 140 users actually need to be using full blown Office products. I do not actually know how this AD setup works but the sales person said it was an option.
So my question is this: Since our base image will have Office Pro Plus 2019 installed, what will happen if a user that does NOT have access to use Office Pro Plus opens a Word or Excel document on the virtual desktop? Is the system smart enough to fall back to Microsoft Word/Excel/Powerpoint Reader? I would love that if it is the case because I can then start out with the smallest number of people on the subscription and then add more people as needed. Nothing will "break" and we won't have to change practice to sending PDF rather than Word documents.
I am looking to move on from Microsoft Office 2010, which is installed completely on the base image that is cloned for everyone by Horizon. I want to purchase Office 365, specifically the Office Pro Plus 2019 package that has just the basic applications with no email plan or other non-essentials. We will also not be extending Office to home users. I plan to control access to launching Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc through Active Directory so I can tightly control my licensing. I am guessing that about half of my 140 users actually need to be using full blown Office products. I do not actually know how this AD setup works but the sales person said it was an option.
So my question is this: Since our base image will have Office Pro Plus 2019 installed, what will happen if a user that does NOT have access to use Office Pro Plus opens a Word or Excel document on the virtual desktop? Is the system smart enough to fall back to Microsoft Word/Excel/Powerpoint Reader? I would love that if it is the case because I can then start out with the smallest number of people on the subscription and then add more people as needed. Nothing will "break" and we won't have to change practice to sending PDF rather than Word documents.
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